Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Facebook censorship: Targeting orthodox Christians and conservatives

"Media Research Center President Brent Bozell will meet with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday to address the social media website's censorship issues. In anticipation of that meeting, Bozell made the following statement:

“I look forward to sitting down with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook because, as I’ll explain to them, no one knows more about liberal bias in the media than we do. We have been documenting and exposing it for almost 30 years. Facebook has a serious problem. Trust is everything and now conservatives don’t trust them. My hope is that today’s meeting will begin to put concerns to rest.”

The liberal media are all over one part of the Facebook scandal story - and ignoring another. Generally, media have covered the accusations that the social media site is censoring conservative news and sources from their trending news feed. Coincidentally, this is also the part of the Facebook story affecting the media.

Potentially a bigger scandal (because it affects more people) is the accusation that Facebook censors individual member pages, blogs, smaller media outlets, and discussion groups reflecting a conservative point of view. Sometimes, the sites are shut down, sometimes they are simply threatened into silence.

In 2013, a Facebook page for the conservative website "Chicks on The Right" was threatened with a shut-down after posting a message criticizing White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. According to the site, the "offending" message of “Jay Carney can kiss my assular area” violated the site’s standards, so it blocked the "Chicks" site. Only because Fox News' Todd Starnes learned of and publicized the incident was "Chicks on The Right" was saved from a permanent place in the Facebook penalty box.

Starnes' interest in Facebook censorship may stem from the time he was placed in the Facebook penitentiary. You may want to make sure there are no kids in the room before you go on because the Fox News host's "horrible" violation was a post mentioning four offensive subjects in the same paragraph. The proper nouns were: Paula Deen, Chick-fil-A, the NRA and Jesus Christ.

"I'm about as politically incorrect as you can get. I'm wearing an NRA ball cap, eating a Chick-fil-A sandwich, reading a Paula Deen cookbook and sipping a 20-ounce sweet tea while sitting in my Cracker Barrel rocking chair with the Gaither Vocal Band singing 'Jesus Saves' on the stereo and a Gideon's Bible in my pocket. Yes sir, I'm politically incorrect and happy as a June bug."

Mr. Starnes says he received a message from the Facebook police that said:

"We removed this from Facebook because it violates our Community Standards," Facebook wrote me. "So you're temporarily blocked from using this feature."

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Readers of this Blog know that I was temporarily blocked from posting by Facebook because I objected to the incivility being directed against presidential candidate Donald Trump. See here and here. This comes as no surprise. It was Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf (My Story) who said that, "The chief function of propaganda is to convince the masses, who slowness of
understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information;
and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their
mind.........the slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from
several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the
same formula. The one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible
results that such a personal policy secures."

"Once they succeeded in ending democracy and
turning Germany into a one-party dictatorship, the Nazis orchestrated a massive
propaganda campaign to win the loyalty and cooperation of Germans. The Nazi
Propaganda Ministry, directed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, took control of all forms
of communication in Germany: newspapers, magazines, books, public meetings, and
rallies, art, music, movies, and radio. Viewpoints in any way
threatening to Nazi beliefs or to the regime were censored or eliminated from
all media.

During the spring of 1933, Nazi student
organizations, professors, and librarians made up long lists of books they
thought should not be read by Germans. Then, on the night of May 10, 1933, Nazis
raided libraries and bookstores across Germany. They marched by torchlight in
nighttime parades, sang chants, and threw books into huge bonfires. On that
night more than 25,000 books were burned. Some were works of Jewish writers,
including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Most of the books were by
non-Jewish writers, including such famous Americans as Jack London, Ernest
Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis, whose ideas the Nazis viewed as different from
their own and therefore not to be read.

The Nazi censors also burned the
books of Helen Keller, who had overcome her deafness and blindness to become a
respected writer; told of the book burnings, she responded: "Tyranny cannot
defeat the power of ideas." Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States
protested the book burnings, a clear violation of freedom of speech, in public
rallies in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis.

Schools also
played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas. While some books were removed
from classrooms by censors, other textbooks, newly written, were brought in to
teach students blind obedience to the party, love for Hitler, and anti-Semitism.
After-school meetings of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls trained
children to be faithful to the Nazi party. In school and out, young people
celebrated such occasions as Adolf Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of his
taking power."

Today, censorship is beginning to
be used against Christians to silence moral opposition to abortion and
homosexuality. Today's censors do not have to gather up thousands of books,
march by torchlight in nighttme parades and throw books into huge bonfires.
They have merely to strike a few keys from the comfort of their
offices.Inflated in their rebellion against the God-Man, the Sons of
Satan, those committed toward the atheistic program of attacking the Church
from without and undermining it from within in preparation for the Man-God,
will continue to intensify their persecution of craftiness and subversion until
it reaches its culmination in an explosion of hate-filled rage which will bear
much blood and death. Father Livio Fanzaga, writing about the Antichrist, says
that, "Catholicism alone will resist him. How then do we destroy this
superstition which alone obstructs the world's self-revelation? How do we
destroy this superstition which divides mankind and which prevents man from
being truly brotherly and free? The true Antichrist is revealed in the
replies to these questions. Here is perceived his profound being as the man of
iniquity. He will not tolerate the idea of men who adore any god other than
himself. His intolerance obliges him to make an exception to his pacifism and
his philosophy of non-violence. He is the greatest pacifist in the history of
the human race, but because peace and justice really reign on earth he will make
an exception to kill and destroy the great superstition of Catholicism, once and
for all time..." (Wrath of God: The Days of the Antichrist, p. 124).

On September 15, 1992, Our Lady told
Father Gobbi of the Marian Movement of Priests that, "..It is the hour of my
great sorrow for the Church, my dearly beloved Daughter. How grievously the
Church is suffering in these times, as she carries her great cross and climbs
the bloodstained Calvary of her passion and her bloody immolation! Never
before, as today, has the Church been made so utterly like my Son Jesus. She is
like Him in solitude and abandonment; she is like Him in denial and betrayal;
she is like Him in contempt and condemnation; she is like Him in her crucifixion
and in her agony. This is the hour of my great sorrow for the Church, because
the hour of her redemptive passion has come. It is the gour of my great sorrow
for humanity, so ill and so reduced to slavery by the spirits of evil. The
diabolical powers are ruling the earth and producing everywhere the wicked
fruits of their dark reign. And thus this humanity has again become pagan,
after almost two thousand years of its redemption and of the first announcement
of the Gospel of salvation. Faithlessness and impiety again cover it; sins
wound it; evil poisons it; pride rules it; impurity seduces it; egoism and
hatred enchain it; Satan reduces it more and more to slavery and reigns over you
with his diabolical power...This is the hour of my great sorrow for all of you,
my poor children, because the time of your great suffering has come. Take
refuge in me. Hasten to the sure refuge of my Immaculate Heart, because we must
live together through the hour of the greatest trial, which has now come for
you, for the Church and for all humanity."

1 comment:

"Cardinal Raymond Burke -- head of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta -- has warned Catholics worldwide:

Quoting a late Jesuit catechetical writer, American Cardinal Raymond Burke said that Catholicism is facing “the worst crisis in its entire history,” due in part to a “betrayal of truth by those who claim to follow Christ and to be members of the Church,” and has warned faithful Catholics to prepare for “martyrdom.”This comes just days after Fr. Rosica of "Salt and Light TV" condemned faithful Catholics as mere "bloggers" and the efforts of faithful lay Catholics to defend against the divisions presented by professional bureaucrats as contributing to a "cesspool of hatred."

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About Me

Born in Bitburg, Germany,
Paul Melanson is a Catholic lay-philosopher and apologist whose work has appeared in many publications and websites including The Union Leader, The Wanderer, Seattle Catholic, Newsblaze, Helium, and Amazines. He has been interviewed by The National Catholic Register, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the television newsmagazine Chronicle.